I gave up on The God Delusion and instead read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life In The Emerald City, which is a clear-eyed, meticulous and very entertaining - if I can use the word in this context - account of what went wrong in Iraq after the initial invasion. Much of the blame seems to be laid at the door of a turf war between the State Department and Department of Defence (sorry, Defense) about who was running the reconstruction effort. The rest of it is down to the fact that nobody appears to have known what they were doing, and those who did appear to have been sidelined as soon as they spoke up.Chandrasekaran was the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief and he writes like a master. It's an object lesson in good, clear journalism. And apparently it's now being filmed.

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